(A quick note: since I last sent out a newsletter Substack has turned into a reactionary garbage fire, throwing money at the TERF-y just-asking-questions crowd. I may move this newsletter back to TinyLetter as a result, but I publish it so infrequently that I have yet to figure out a solution. Just to be very clear, the official editorial position of On Gurney Hill is that trans lives matter, and anyone who suggests otherwise, whether overtly or under the guise of “anti-woke” free speech, can get fucked.)
Here are a few things I bought between August 2020 and February 2021: a baguette-baking kit, Barbie neck joints from a woman in Greece (don't ask), seeds, a cocktail mixing glass. But one item that I positively did not purchase during those seven months is garlic. For more than half a year I maintained allium independence, eating only what I grew myself — and eating lots of it both because of pride, and the fact that homegrown garlic tastes very, very good. The hardneck variety I grew (maybe it's rojo, maybe it's some other red variety? I unfortunately do not remember) is strong without being hot, and has an earthy depth to it that's far more complex that whatever peeling, paper-white heads they sell at the supermarket. But now? Now I have to buy garlic. From the store! Humiliating! All I want is to have enough garlic — and enough onions and shallots and potatoes and tomatoes and chiles and beans and various types of fermented cabbage — that I simply do not have to buy any. Like at all.
So this I guess is how the pandemic — the months of Big Grocery Shopping, the huge bags of rice, the doubling up on coffee, the buying two if not three things of olive oil — has broken my brain. I've fully left behind my luxury California gardener self, with my ultra-fresh peas and fava beans, and fully embraced being a prepper staples gardener, hoping to turn a Maine summer into a year-long root cellar for a Brooklyn apartment. You know, living the good life, Nearings style. Or trying to at least. Because now, in this slack season when it's spring but we’ve not yet reached the last frost date in Hope (which falls at the very end of May lol), a garden is all about promise. It's a flat of seedlings on the kitchen counter, thickets of storage onions and shallots planted densely like grass sitting outside on the windowsill.
Dedicated readers may be wondering: don't I write some version of this essay every spring on my little garlic blog? Yes, absolutely. But I swear it feels different every year, each season like drawing a circle that closes just a bit ahead of where it started, spiraling forward into something new. My tomatoes and chiles are all early-ripening varieties that will hopefully mature during the actual summertime rather than fall — and will result in more than a tiny handful of green cayennes. I want ristra-quantities of chiles. I ditched the massive cabbage collards I've grown for the last two years (collard greens that head-up like cabbage) because they also need too long of a growing season, and have seedlings going for napa cabbage (a first for me), and two heirloom green cabbages historically grown for sauerkraut. I have seed for everything that I'm not starting indoors — a new pea variety, Styrian pumpkins (that I will maaaybe be able to make pumpkin-seed oil out of), saved stashes of cowpeas and indigenous Norridgewock beans, a climbing variety that has been grown in Maine since before Maine was Maine. I have a bag of tiny butterball potatoes that probably look like spiders now with squiggly little shoots growing out of their eyes. And the garlic was already planted months ago, about 100 cloves in all, which should very soon be pushing their first green blades up out of their bed of straw mulch.
The other day, I opened a new jar of apple jelly, pulled down from my stockpile of...many, many jars of apple jelly, canned peaches, peach butter, and other preserves. There's nothing precious about these jars for me — I have plenty, and it's more a question of whether not I will actually eat all of it rather than if I will run out. Next winter (and hopefully into next spring), I want to feel the same way about canned tomatoes, about onions, beans, and garlic. I want to have enough.